The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  ”I know.”

  “I guess I didn’t want to believe it. Hell, I didn’t even want to think it.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re right, of course. The man must be removed.”

  “Not assassinated,” MacGregor said quickly.

  “No, not assassinated. Removed from office and brought to trial. All this must come out. What happened over the last four years, or however long it turns out to have been happening, must be analyzed and understood so that it can never happen again.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s nothing that can never happen again,” MacGregor said dryly. “After every war the generals and politicians get together and analyze it and write books about it so it can never happen again. But it hardly matters what they conclude. It’ll still happen again. It always does, bigger and better.”

  “Don’t give me that existential crap, Tank,” Aaron said. “The human race does improve, slowly and painfully. And governments and political systems do work better now than they did in the past. We’ve gotten two hundred years out of this one already; maybe with a retread we can go another couple of hundred.”

  “We won’t go another year if that man isn’t stopped. You’d better go to it,” MacGregor said. “Bring the Jubilee.”

  “I may need you,” Aaron said.

  “Name it,” MacGregor said.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Aaron told him. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Uriah Vandermeer sat behind his desk, his feet planted squarely on the floor, his fingers laced together over the glass desktop. There was a pensive, somewhat distant expression on his face. He was staring at—or possibly through—the John Pelow oil portrait of his daughter Kathy on the wall to his right. Pelow had captured the youthful coltish look, perhaps in the flow of the long blonde hair, or the hands frozen in mid-gesture. Underneath, for Pelow was a master, the quick intelligence shone through, and something of the curiosity, the innocence, of the child-woman: the child she had been, and the woman she now would never become.

  “You blame me,” Vandermeer said. “I know you do.”

  Did the girl in the portrait shake her head slightly—or was it merely a trick of the light? Pelow was good with light.

  Vandermeer took off his glasses and rested his head on his arms. “It seemed like—” he paused and thought, then peered back up at the picture. “You get carried along by events. One thing leads to another and you never stop to reexamine your basic premises. Things polarize. Good is what you do for the President. Bad is what’s done by those against you and the President. Can you understand that?”

  Kathy stared silently down at him.

  “I should have done it long ago,” he said. “I will try. You’ll see. I didn’t permit myself to think about what was happening. That man led me, step by step, inch by inch, and I— What’s that?” He cocked his head and listened closely, for a minute, to the picture.

  “I don’t know how yet, but I will,” he told it. “Trust me.”

  There was a polite knock on the door, and Vandermeer turned away from the portrait as Mrs. Fleischer, his private secretary, entered the room.

  Aaron Adams leaned back in the leather armchair and looked slowly around his study, surveying his six companions. Each of them had been quietly and separately approached, and each had agreed, with differing degrees of fervor, that Something Must Be Done. But now, together, they were slowly pulling themselves toward the only conclusion, forcing themselves to face what it was that had to be done, and what their parts in the doing would have to be. Adams had shepherded them along through the discussion, explaining carefully what the options were and keeping the discussion headed in some loose way from the premise to the inevitable conclusion.

  And now it was done. The words were said, the thought was spoken, and the vast chasm was suddenly open before them.

  “Here we are then, gentlemen,” Adams said. “We are now, each of us, guilty of conspiracy to commit treason. Within the next two months we’ll have succeeded in unseating the President of the United States and forcing a new election, or we’ll all be in prison or dead. I think we can pull this off, but it is, at best, a long shot. If any of you have not faced the possibility of your death in the past, you will have the chance to do so now.”

  “Hell, Aaron,” Grier Laporte said, stirring the ice in his bourbon around with his finger, “you can get killed crossing the street. You can go to prison for a lot less than that. Especially these days.”

  Adams smiled grimly. “I just wanted to make sure that none of you could say he wasn’t warned.”

  “Don’t play with words,” Admiral Bunt said. “We’ve got to get that crazy son of a bitch before he turns this nation into a dictatorship.”

  “Something I don’t understand, Aaron,” Grier Laporte said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why us? I mean: why TEPACS? How does it happen that the group of people you play poker with are the ones you choose to form a cabal?”

  “Not the whole group, Grier. Just you six. Principally because of what we sociopolitical scientists call your acquaintanceship network. Each of you is in a position, because of your current job or the professional friendships you’ve built up over the years, to fill one of the slots I need filled.”

  “Don’t waste time on the lecture, Aaron,” Colonel Baker said. “You’re conducting this orchestra. Just lay it out for us.”

  “Now, I think we should discuss this fully,” Obie Porfritt said. “And I still maintain that, if the President announces a date on which the election will be held, we should abandon the scheme.”

  “Until we see how he weasels out of it? Come on,” Sanderman Jones said, “you know that the longer this cabal is in existence without having a coup, the greater the risk of it blowing up in our faces. If we’re going to do this at all, we follow through.”

  “A couple of things,” George Masters said.

  “What?”

  “We’re not going to assassinate the son of a bitch.”

  “That’s understood. We have to bring him to account, to put him and his people on trial.”

  “Right. And if we succeed, we hold elections as soon as possible after.”

  “Of course.”

  “If we’re going to do this,” Admiral Bunt said, “let’s get with it. What’s the plan, Aaron? I assume you have a plan.”

  “I have a few notions,” Adams admitted. “But before I go into my ideas, I’d like a little input from you people. Just how do we overthrow the government?”

  “Well, to start with, of course,” Sanderman Jones said from his corner, “we don’t actually overthrow the government. We merely displace the Chief Executive and immediately proclaim loudly that we have restored the government to the people. As, indeed, we shall have. Then we hold an election as soon as possible.”

  “What do you mean, ‘displace the Chief Executive’?” Grier Laporte asked. “Just march into the White House and kick him out? That can’t be all it takes.”

  “Well,” Adams said, “in a sense we do just kick him out. We impeach him in the House, if possible, at the same time as we arrest him. This makes us quasi-legal. Then we put him on trial in the Senate right after the election.”

  “We’d need to establish military control of the District,” Colonel Baker said. “The Eighty-Second Airborne is the obvious unit for that.”

  “Too obvious, I’m afraid,” Aaron said. “If I were the President—certainly if I were this President—I’d make sure the command of the Eighty-Second was in safe hands. As the major ready unit in the Washington area, its too tempting a target. But I don’t know the commander, and haven’t made any attempt to sound him out.”

  “We don’t need the whole division, you know,” Baker said. “Just a couple of regiments, and a way to immobilize the rest. The regimental commanders aren’t picked for their political purity, that’s too far down the totem pole.”

  “A good point, Francis. We have to determine what the minimum n
umber of troops we need to control the area is.”

  “To do that,” Jones pointed out, “we have to determine first what the area we need to control is. Can we get away with just grabbing the White House, or do we need to hold a perimeter including say, the Capitol and the Pentagon?”

  “My feeling is that we don’t have to physically take much beyond the White House itself,” Aaron said. “And effectively neutralize a few other key areas, like the Pentagon, for some limited time.”

  “There’s another consideration,” Admiral Bunt said. “The United States is the linchpin of free world defense. We don’t want our adversaries to get the wrong idea of what our internal situation is while this is going on. The men with the go codes will still have their hands on the buttons.”

  “There’s another side to that, David,” Sanderman Jones said. “We can’t take any chances that the President, in his last seconds, will start a global war.”

  “He wouldn’t—” Laporte said, looking startled. “I mean, not even—”

  ”We can’t take the chance,” Jones insisted. “It has to be covered.”

  “I see what you mean about acquaintanceship nets, Aaron,” Bunt said. “I think I know the man who knows the man to take care of that. And I think he’ll go along.”

  “That puts us halfway there,” Aaron said.

  “Media!” Laporte said suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Media. That’s the way. Immediate live television coverage of the whole thing.”

  “What good will that do?” Masters demanded.

  Laporte bit off the tip of a cigar and spat it into the ashtray, and then busied himself puffing it to life before he answered. “As I see it,” he said, “the problem is credibility. Right? I mean, if we’re going to do this thing, then we have to make people believe as quickly as possible that it’s done. That it’s over. That we’ve won. And we do a couple of highly visible acts that will get the people behind us. Then no military unit, no matter how loyal they are to the President, will try to move in and re-coup—or countercoup—or whatever.”

  “What kind of highly visible acts?” Porfritt asked.

  “There’s one great obvious problem with that,” Jones said. “If we have TV coverage there and it looks like we’re losing instead of winning, that’s likely to encourage the opposition. But it might be worth the risk. For one thing, the cameras will be on our side of the lines.”

  “Why isn’t Ian Faulkes here?” Masters asked. “He could help plan this media thing if we do it.”

  “I didn’t ask him because he’s British,” Aaron said. “I thought we should have an all-American coup. But I suppose we could clue him in enough so that he could have cameras at the right places at the right time. I’ll sound him out.”

  “Say,” Jones said. “Has anyone kept up with the count on those internal confinement camps of the President’s? How many are there now, and what’s the population?”

  “I believe there are somewhere around eight of them now,” Masters said. “With about twenty-five hundred inmates per camp.”

  “That’s incredible!” Obie Porfritt said. “Are you sure? Twenty thousand people?”

  “It is incredible,” Masters said. “I have a notion that the American people—that great silent majority—would be very upset if they realized the extent of this thing. But its been kept very low profile. Burying twenty thousand people in a country this size is easy, if you’re the government. The public does not know.”

  “I didn’t know,” Obie said. “A few camps, I thought. A few hundred dissenters. Even that disturbed me, but that I could live with. I had no idea—”

  ”What’s the point, Sandy?” Aaron asked.

  “There’s one of our ‘highly visible acts’,” Jones explained. “Like Lincoln freeing the slaves. As soon as we have anything like a toehold, we announce the immediate closing of all the IC camps and the release of the prisoners. And we announce the total number of camps and their population—with lists, if possible.”

  “Good!” Aaron said. “Very good.”

  “How long, do you estimate, before D-Day?” Baker asked.

  “Soon,” Aaron said. “So we’ll all have to get on the stick, there’s a lot to do. I don’t think I have to tell everyone here to keep their mouths shut, do I?”

  “We need an operational code word,” Sanderman Jones said. “A nice, innocuous, operational code word.”

  Everyone in the room turned to look at Aaron Adams.

  “Jubilee,” Aaron said. He looked at each of them in turn—thin, elegant Sanderman Jones; tall, plump Grier Laporte; Colonel Baker, who took things too seriously; Obediah Porfritt, who wasn’t sure; Rear Admiral David Bunt, who would do what he had to do; George Masters, the consummate professional—and he wondered which of them would come through and which of them would fail. And he wondered what they would think of him six months from now—if any of them were still alive.

  “Jubilee,” Obie Porfritt said. “Let’s drink to that. Might not get another chance.” And he bustled around handing out glasses and opening a bottle of champagne that had been sitting in Aaron’s refrigerator since New Year’s Eve.

  When Obie had finished pouring, Aaron raised his glass to the group. “Gentlemen,” he said, “bring the Jubilee.”

  They drank.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Headquarters

  Marine Corps Educational Center

  Quantico, Virginia

  to: All Officers and Enlisted Personnel

  subject: Post Lecture

  On Saturday, 6 November, 1976, at 1330 hours, General of the Army Hiram MacGregor will deliver the Post Lecture at the O’Bannon Theater.

  Lieutenant General Moor is pleased to welcome General MacGregor to Quantico, and wishes all off-duty officers to attend the lecture. Enlisted personnel are encouraged to attend.

  General MacGregor’s topic will be “The Chain of Command.”

  T. R. Roseau, Colonel, USMC

  OIC training and plans

  The lecture attracted a standing-room-only crowd, which the commanding officer, Lieutenant General Clement C, Moor, assured Tank was unique in the history of the post lecture series. “You’re still a hero, Tank. Maybe even, by now, a legend.”

  The lecture had been followed by the usual VIP show: a tour of the base, a cocktail reception at the Officers’ Club, and a formal dress dinner for the senior officers and their wives at Quarters Number One, the residence of the base commander, General Moor.

  Now, as the last guest left, Generals MacGregor and Moor settled down in the living room to talk over old times. They spoke of Uijonbu and Yudam-ni, of Humhung and Yongdok, and they toasted fallen comrades, MacGregor with his bourbon over ice, and General Moor with a tall glass of ginger ale. “You’re not drinking,” MacGregor said, gesturing with his glass. “I mean, you know, drinking.”

  “I was drinking,” Moor told him. “Believe it, I was drinking. Then one morning I woke up in a strange bed, staring at a white ceiling, with no feeling from my shoulders down. And a man with a white smock and a stethoscope came in and told me what my gut looked like from the inside, and gave me a choice.” Moor lifted his glass, and grinned. “I chose ginger ale.”

  “A good choice,” MacGregor said.

  “My wife and kids think so,” Moor said. “And I’m of more use to the Corps as a teetotaler than as a dead drunk—with the emphasis on ‘dead’.”

  MacGregor looked at the stocky, broad-shouldered Marine sitting opposite him and weighed the words he had come to say, and wondered how best to say them, and his glass felt heavy in his hands. “I’m glad you’re alive, Clem,” he said. “I’d rather have a Marine next to me in a fight than anyone else. And I’d rather it be you than any other Marine.”

  “Go on,” Moor said, grinning broadly. “At my age!”

  “There are fights, and there are fights,” MacGregor said. “I’ve got a good ten years on you, Clem, and the kind of fights a man my age gets into aren’t
won with your fists.”

  General Moor leaned forward in his chair. “Speaking of fights,” he said, “that was an important bit of business you did, Tank, in keeping the Army out of the prison-camp business.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “It was the worst-kept secret since ‘He is risen’,” Moor said. “I don’t know what you told our C-in-C, but you must have made it strong. We were trying to figure out how to keep the Corps’s skirts clean if he asked us, but he never did. We did get involved in that riot.”

  “What riot?”

  “Down in Florida, in one of those camps. The prisoners—or internees, or whatever we’re supposed to call them—went on a hunger strike that turned into a riot. I understand the guards threw the food at them, or something. Anyhow, they trashed their barracks and grabbed a few guards as hostages. The warden, or whatever he calls himself, called in the Marines. One company was dispatched. By the time they got there there were cameramen all over the place. Almost had to trample them down to get to the riot. And they weren’t from any of the networks, either; they were government. The whole thing was hushed up, and the pictures were never used, as far as I know.”

  General Moor lit a new cigarette from the stub of his last one, and smiled at MacGregor’s disapproving expression. “I couldn’t give up everything, Tank,” he said. “Now, do you want to tell me what you’re here for, or do we have to stall around some more until you’re good and ready?”

  “What do you mean?” MacGregor asked.

  “When Jerry Rosen called up and suggested that you come give our post lecture this month, I was delighted. But I got the feeling that it was your idea. Which is fine. But if you’d wanted to come visit, you would have just come visit. You wanted to be invited. Which means you have some reason for wanting to be here without seeming to want to be here. If you follow that.”